Response to the Brief

The brief I have decided to go for is a film opening, and I have decided to an action/horror hybrid for my genre. My initial ideas for the brief is one protagonist, who is yet to have a name, finds out about a supernatural army of half ghost, half man and he has to try and take them down. This idea will let me use typical conventions of both genres and will give me an opportunity to try and get the two genres to work together. My target audience is people around 12-18 year-olds, as the film may be an action/horror, but the film is not too gory that younger children cannot watch it, and the horror aspect is mostly jump scares and tension, and not any types of torture or gory painful deaths like the ones in films like Saw.

My general idea for the opening is for the protagonist to give a small monologue about the back story of the film, so he will talk about when the ghosts started appearing and when he started trying to take them down. Whilst this is happening, there will be small clips fading in and out of him fighting a few of these ghosts and this will give me a few opportunities to use jump cuts and smoke effects to make the ghosts look like they disappear.

Normal things to find in an action film would be things like death defying stunts, near death situations, fights, a female damsel in distress, a male protagonist and a male villain. I will not be able to include all of these aspects into my film as some of them do counteract themselves with convergence of a horror film, and also I will not have a budget big enough for special things like death defying stunts and near death situations. I will be able to include a fight scene, as I can make a choreographed scene with fake punches and kicks within it.

Convergence of a typical horror theme are blood and gore, a male damsel in distress who is weak and vulnerable, a twisted and different antagonist, sometimes human, sometimes a monster or supernatural being, tense atmospheres and things that will make an audience jump. I can include some of these things into my production, as I want to use the idea of ghosts to try and make jump scares with ghosts appearing in front of the camera with a cinematic boom. I also am using the idea of a supernatural antagonist, with the ghosts that I am going to be adding to the film.

The piece of existing media I am using as an inspiration is the film I Am Number Four, as it is an action film, that has supernatural beings fighting the protagonist to try and kill him. The film also has some horror elements, even though it is not regarded as a horror film, as some scenes can make people jump, like the scene near the end where something is suddenly thrown at a window and makes a loud banging noise, which will make the audience jump.